Brown Arts
Our Storied Health Film and Media Series
Fall 2023 — Fall 2024
Upcoming: "Zurawski v Texas" on December 2
FILM | PANEL
A year-long integrated media experience that illuminates the importance of our collective health and what can be done to enhance it.
Our Storied Health Film and Media Series
Fall 2023 — Fall 2024
Upcoming: "Zurawski v Texas" on December 2
FILM | PANEL
A year-long integrated media experience that illuminates the importance of our collective health and what can be done to enhance it.
An IGNITE Series Campus Project
Curated by Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo (Director, The Pandemic Center – Brown School of Public Health) and Dr. Jennifer Galvin ’95 (epidemiologist, filmmaker)
Upcoming Event
ZURAWSKI V TEXAS
Monday, December 2, 2024
5:00 PM - Reception | 5:45 PM - Film Screening
Followed by a Community Discussion with the Filmmakers
Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Martinos Auditorium
Free and open to the public!
Women denied abortions under Texas’s ambiguous and unforgiving abortion bans band together with a fearless attorney to sue Texas. While battling in court against the state and its immovable Attorney General, the extent of their traumatic experiences is revealed as they wrestle to regain their reproductive futures and set a precedent for millions of other women and families. ZURAWSKI V TEXAS reveals the dire impact of losing access to healthcare—and the extraordinary efforts of the women and men fighting on the frontline to regain those rights.
“An essential watch in light of the US election results.”
—Together Films founder and CEO Sarah Mosses
About the Panelists
Director/Producer/DOP | Maisie Crow
Maisie Crow is a documentary filmmaker and photojournalist based in Texas. Her films have aired on HBO and Showtime. She is a director and producer of Zurawski v. Texas. Her 2021 documentary At the Ready premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and can now be seen on MAX. In 2018, her documentary, Jackson, received a News and Documentary Emmy award for Outstanding Social Issue Documentary. The film won 15 film festival awards for best documentary and audience favorite. In 2022, she was part of This American Life’s reporting team on the Peabody-winning episode The Pink House at the Center of the World. Her short films The Last Clinic and A Life Alone were both nominated for News and Documentary Emmy awards. Her work has also been recognized by the Overseas Press Club, American Society of Magazine Editors, Pictures of the Year International and World Press Photo. Maisie has taught photojournalism and video storytelling as an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. In 2019, Maisie and her husband took the helm of The Big Bend Sentinel and Presidio International newspapers in Far West Texas, building a community gathering space around the publications to help bolster readership and revenue.
Abbie Perrault
Director/Producer | Abbie Perrault Abbie Perrault is a documentary filmmaker and journalist based in Chicago, Illinois. She is a director and producer of the feature documentary Zurawski v. Texas. Previously she produced At the Ready, which premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at Sundance Film Festival in 2021 and streams on MAX. She has associate produced the documentary shorts An Abortion in Mississippi and Reproductive Rights Road Trip for The Intercept and was the impact producer on the Emmy-award winning documentary Jackson, which premiered on Showtime in 2016. Her previous work as managing editor of The Big Bend Sentinel and Presidio International newspapers in Marfa, Texas has been recognized by the Texas Press Association for general excellence and her reporting received awards for outstanding feature writing and outstanding news writing. Her film work has been supported by the IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund, The Gotham, Catapult Film Fund, Ford Foundation, XTR, and the Austin Film Society, and she was a 2019 fellow in New Orleans Film Society's Southern Producers Lab.
Professor Elizabeth Tobin-Tyler
Elizabeth Tobin-Tyler, JD, MA, is Associate Professor of Health Services, Policy and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health and of Family Medicine and Medical Science at the Alpert Medical School. She teaches in the areas of health policy, health justice, public health law and ethics, and reproductive rights and justice. Her research and writing focus on the structural and legal determinants of health and health inequity, public health law and policy, reproductive justice, maternal and child health disparities, domestic violence, poverty and social safety nets, and interprofessional health justice education. Ms. Tobin-Tyler is an international expert in the development of medical-legal partnerships, which integrate healthcare, public health and legal services to identify, address and prevent health-harming social and legal needs of underserved patients and populations. She is senior editor and a contributor to the first textbook on the topic, Poverty, Health and Law: Readings and Cases for Medical-Legal Partnership, published in 2011. She is co-author with Joel Teitelbaum of Essentials of Health Justice: Law, Policy and Structural Change, 2nd edition (Jones and Bartlett Learning, 2022), which focuses on the structural and legal determinants of health injustice. She has published numerous articles, including in The New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Academic Medicine, Public Health Reports, The Lancet, Health Affairs, The Harvard Journal of Health and Human Rights, Journal of Legal Medicine, Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, Journal of Health and Biomedical Law, Journal of Health Care Law and Policy, and The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. She has been selected for several fellowships and honors, including for the Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine Forum by the National Academy of Medicine, as a Public Health Law Education Faculty Fellow by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and as a fellow at the Law, Health, Justice Centre at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia.
About the Series
Our Storied Health Film and Media Series is a year-long integrated media experience that illuminates the importance of our collective health and what can be done to enhance it. Through film screenings, campus conversations, and how-to workshops, this series showcases the power of storytelling as a public health intervention. The Series is curated by Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, Director of the Pandemic Center of the Brown School of Public Health, with epidemiologist and documentary filmmaker Dr. Jennifer Galvin ’95.
"Story is a way people come together to solve problems... At a time when there is a critical need to create and provide credible public health information, storytelling – through film, music, art and more – can be a valuable resource." –Dr. Jennifer Galvin '95 (Filmmaker in Residence)
Past Film Screenings & Panels
SHOT IN THE ARM
Scott Hamilton Kennedy (THE GARDEN, FOOD EVOLUTION) had begun investigating the global measles epidemic. It was long before anyone had heard of COVID-19. He was filming with top public health officials–including Tony Fauci–as well as rare interviews with anti-vaccine activists who were persuading parents by the millions to refuse vaccines for their children.
Then COVID-19 happened.
Acting quickly, Kennedy shifted his directorial eye to this once-in-a-century tragedy. Both skeptical and hopeful, SHOT IN THE ARM explores vaccine hesitancy historically and in the context of our modern pandemic. Can we replace cynicism with healthy curiosity and bridge the political divides that make us sick?
SHOT IN THE ARM is a film by Scott Hamilton Kennedy, Executive Produced by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
With panelists Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo (Director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown School of Public Health), Dr. Jennifer Galvin ’95 (Environmental Scientist and Documentary Filmmaker), and journalist Maggie Fox.
ANONYMOUS SISTER
94 minutes / USA / 2023
When a young woman turns to the camera for refuge, she ends up with a firsthand account of what will become the deadliest man-made epidemic in United States history. Thirty years in the making, Anonymous Sister is Emmy Award®-winning director, Jamie Boyle’s chronicle of her family’s collision with the opioid epidemic.
There will be a reception at 5:30 PM and a 6:00 PM screening, followed by a panel and community discussion with Brown Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology Josiah “Jody” Rich, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology Dr. Alex Macmadu, and the film’s director Jamie Boyle.
MOSSVILLE: WHEN GREAT TREES FALL
Mossville, Louisiana: A once-thriving community founded by formerly enslaved and free people of color, and an economically flourishing safe haven for generations of African American families. Today it’s a breeding ground for petrochemical plants and their toxic black clouds. Many residents are forced from their homes, and those that stay suffer from prolonged exposure to contamination and pollution. Amid this chaos and injustice stands one man who refuses to abandon his family’s land - and his community.
Mossville will be followed by a panel featuring Erica Walker, ScD, MS, the RGSS Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health. Dr. Walker runs Community Noise Lab at Brown University, who’s primary aim is to explore the relationship between community noise and health, holistically.
Also joining the panel will be Valerie Tutson, founding member and director of the Rhode Island Black Storytellers and FUNDA FEST: A Celebration of Black Storytelling. She graduated from Brown University with a self-designed major, Storytelling as a Communications Art, and a Masters in Theatre, and received an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Rhode Island College. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the Pell Award for Artistic Excellence from Trinity Repertory Theatre in Providence.
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POWER OF THE DREAM
Power of the Dream is a new documentary film about the empowering and unlikely true story of how a group of professional women's basketball players took on a WNBA team owner and rallied behind now-Senator Raphael Warnock, forever changing the landscape of their sport and the course of U.S. politics. There will be a reception at 5:00pm and a 5:45pm screening, which will be followed by a panel and community discussion.
Panelist
Dr. Lucia Hulsether is a 2024-25 Senior Fellow in Race and Ethnicity at Brown and an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College. Her core areas of research and teaching include capitalism and labor, histories of social movements, feminist theory, popular culture and media, and other topics in contemporary cultural critique. Her first book, Capitalist Humanitarianism (Duke UP, 2023), won the 2024 First Book Prize from the Cultural Studies Association. She is currently working on two projects: one on the gendered history of youth civic engagement programs and another on the cultures of competitive college debate. Raised in east Tennessee as an avid Lady Vols fan, Lucia still counts women's basketball as her first love.
Panel Discussion Videos
In the News
The Brown Daily Herald
Director of ‘Power of the Dream’ discusses collective action amid upcoming elections
Brown’s Pandemic Center hosted a screening and discussion with the film’s director.
Read Article
School of Public Health
“Our Storied Health” Examines Public Health Communications, Anti-Vax Movement
The Pandemic Center kicks off Brown Arts IGNITE film and media series with pre-release screening of Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s “Shot in the Arm,” followed by panel discussion.
Read Article
News from SPH
‘Our Storied Health’ Spotlights the Overdose Epidemic
The latest installment of the Pandemic Center’s film series featured a screening and panel discussion with experts in addiction and harm reduction.
Read Article
Curator Bios
Meet the curators of Our Storied Health Film and Media Series!
Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, DrPH
Dr. Nuzzo is a nationally and globally recognized leader on global health security, public health preparedness and response, and health systems resilience. She regularly advises national governments and for-profit and nonprofit organizations on pandemic preparedness and response, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Fox News, Politico, The Hill, and The Boston Globe. She was featured in Debunking Borat, a television series on Amazon Prime Video, and her work was featured on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. She served as COVID Advisor for the Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.
Dr. Jennifer Galvin, ScD, MPH
Dr. Jennifer Galvin drives societal progress by turning resources—both human and financial—into social impact. A trusted advisor to public health, environmental science, and social innovation leaders, she builds bridges across sectors to find the common pulse between research, film, entrepreneurial, and philanthropic networks. She’s known for producing human-centered projects and directing investment in people, places, and programs to elevate global health.
Brown Arts’ IGNITE Series uplifts the spirit of artistic collaboration across Brown, Providence, the Rhode Island region, and beyond. Ignite your creative curiosity through this multi-year series of programs, activations, interventions, and investigations.